In 1997, Beijing was smaller city, and Keep in Touch, Jamhouse and Nightman were the hippest venues around. There was no traffic on the ring roads, and if you got tired of Chinese food you might take a trip to Fangzhuang to visit this Italian restaurant that had suddenly appeared (should we go to Fangzhuang tonight, honey)? And the really plugged-in? They might even heard of this new district called "Sanlitun" that had a couple of upcoming bars like Poachers....

This week on Sinica, Jeremy and Kaiser are joined by two old friends from the 1990s, Jessica Meider (now a professional musician) and Jonathan Ansfield (now a professional journalist). We don't chat much about, but if you're a long-timer in Beijing, or just curious what it used to be like, join us as we look back at youth, music and share tips on how to do a backflip in a PLA-owned bars.

Popup Chinese strikes me as having a better 'attitude' to Chinese studies, and offers a bit more depth than other providers.

-- East Asia Student

I absolutely love, love, love your site/company. What you all have done with learning Chinese is absolutely wonderful, and deserves some type of Nobel Prize for language learning! You have no idea how many years of boring textbooks I've been through, or maybe you do and that's why you've started this :-)

-- J.N., sinophile

Popup Chinese is a godsend

-- E. Shea, student

The lessons are consistently full of win.... Both the dialogues and the explanations are entertaining and the language in them is very useful. So basically the opposite of using the conventional textbooks that have guided my first couple of years of studying Chinese.

-- Mark's China Blog

There are so many Chinese teaching websites out there, but 99% of them are pure junk, or actually harmful for learning Chinese. I really hope good content like yours will pop out and last. If there is anything I can do to help, please let me know.

-- C.X., Chinese parent

I was amazed on my last trip to China, because I went to Taiyuan, where they say "pingr". I heard it first on Popup Chinese! The conversations on the site at first sounded slurred, but now I notice that that is the way people speak. I listen to my older teaching materials and they are slow and too perfect.

-- E.H., engineer

I've lived for 30 years and Popup Chinese is one of the few amusements that convinces me to delay death each day.

-- Anonymous

I've learned more Chinese, learned faster, and had way more fun learning than I ever thought possible.... I listen so much so often that I can recite some episodes by heart and mimic the voice actor/actress by now (I'm still at the Elementary but these days I can somewhat follow along TV shows and radio, which before only sounded like an incomprehensible jumble of sound).

-- user na.1788

I'm really enjoying Popup Chinese... the authentic sound and pace of the dialogues - even the elementary lessons are spoken at the actual speed you'll hear people speak here, and loaded with kouyuhua.

-- Richard, PekingDuck.org

I've learned more Chinese in this one month spent on this site than the 10 months I spent "learning mandarin" in Shanghai 5 years back.

-- user the.koko

Your site is wonderful! I find your dialogs to be practical, inventive, and interesting. Furthermore, they present natural language, and are well-structured for teaching, with impressive execution (i.e. various voices, and necessary repetition for early learners). I can't say enough good things about your site. :)

-- Yanni (雅匿)

I'm writing to thank you for the one year scholarship to China that I've just received from the Confucius Institute.
I'm a self-learner and have been studying with Popup Chinese as the main curriculum for about a year and a half.
When I passed the HSK (level 3) or speak Chinese or write or read (or do anything with the Chinese language), my friends and family are always impressed, and especially by the fact that I don't go to any class and spent almost nothing learning Chinese.

-- Anna V.

Chinese Podcasts and Lessons from Beijing, China....

Popup Chinese provides world-class podcasts and tools for learning mandarin. Our approach is different from traditional "textbook-centric" learning methods, and has made us not only the highest rated Chinese podcast series on iTunes, but also the only Chinese learning program recommended by the heads of all four major Chinese immersion programs in Beijing, as well as by the most intensive language teaching program in the United States: the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

We teach Chinese because we love it, and developed Popup Chinese out of frustration at the infantilizing and simply unhelpful morass of Chinese learning materials available online. Our goal is helping people achieve real fluency in Chinese, so if you are learning Chinese, create a free account for instant access to our entire archive of Chinese podcasts, along with everything else you need to learn mandarin online: mobile apps, HSK test materials, Chinese study tools and much more.

Why should you trust us? Unlike most Chinese teaching resources, which demonstrate little understanding of what is challenging or interesting to non-native speakers, Popup Chinese is designed from scratch by native English speakers with native-level fluency in Chinese and strong interests in art, literature and popular culture. All of our testimonials are real and unsolicited: we've suffered through the same dry textbooks and ineffective classes you have, and built Popup Chinese to solve the problems we had learning Chinese. You can easily confirm this by searhing for independent reviews of Popup Chinese online, or reading our testimonials. In short, we can radically accellerate your time-to-fluency. So you should create a free account and get started.

Finally, you'll notice the lack of advertisements you may be used to on other sites: this is intentional. Although Popup Chinese is a free education company, we support ourselves by selling premium subscriptions which unlock lesson transcripts and dialogue-only recordings, while allowing you to download all of our audio files to your computer to listen whenever you want through your mobile phone or mp3 player. All subscriptions are backed by a no-questions-asked refund guarantee. So once you've explored our site and know what we have to offer, please consider supporting our efforts.

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